Peter Ohlin: The title of the new book is The Human Predicament. How would you describe that predicament, in a nutshell? David Benatar: Life is hard. We have to struggle, often unsuccessfully, to [More]

This May, the OUP Philosophy team honors Simone de Beauvoir (1908-1986) as their Philosopher of the Month. A French existentialist philosopher, novelist, and feminist theoretician, Beauvoir’s essays [More]

Materialist reductionism can leave us with a a cold, detached view of what it means to be a self and this is having implications for law, psychology, meaning, and other social dynamics. Can existential philosophy pull us out of this seeming morass or should we just accept the reality in which we apparently live and figure out how to get on with things? [More]

In a 1929 lecture, Martin Heidegger argued that the following claim is true: Nothing nothings. In German: “Das Nichts nichtet”. Years later Rudolph Carnap ridiculed this statement as the worst sort [More]

I had the opportunity to contribute a chapter to a book on Steve Jobs in Open Court's "Popular Culture and Philosophy" series. It was a lot of fun! I wrote on the existentialism of Jobs and contrasted it with the more pragmatic mindset of Gates. [More]

Logicians don't rule the world or get the most done. Could it be that a consistent world view is neither desirable nor achievable? If we abandon the straightjacket of rationality might this lead to a more powerful and exciting future, or is it a heresy that leads to madness? [More]

Existentialism has always been very bipolar; it can be as freeing and liberating as it is cold and unforgiving and the HBO series, True Detectives illustrates this tension with a subtle expertise rarely seen in popular media. The show brilliantly explores the angst and despair by constructing a partnership between two detectives, Rust Cohle (Matthew McConaughey) and Martin Hart (Woody Harrelson), who are tasked with solving a ritualistic murder case in the deep south of Louisiana. [More]